Magnus Carlsen is the world’s best chess player but he is on the verge of becoming the best in another game as well. The current world champion is in the top three of Fantasy Premier League game after matches that finished on Saturday.
FPL has more than seven million players worldwide but Carlsen’s team Kjell Ankedal sat at the sixth position after the weekend action, the highlight being the Manchester derby in which United defeated City 2-1.
This is not the first time he has performed exceptionally well in FPL. In the 2017-’18 season, he finished among the top 3000 players. Carlsen is currently competing at the London Chess Classic at Olympia.
Chess journalist Tarjei Svensen, who has followed Carlsen since he was eight-years-old said that the grandmaster spends hours watching football when not busy playing chess.
“His ability at fantasy league has been known for a couple of seasons now, but this season has been exceptional and he’s had another good week,” Svensen was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“His rise up the charts is incredible. He had a really good year for a while last season and then he dropped a couple of hundred places at the end of the season, but he was still in the top 1,000. His level of knowledge about English football is amazing, which must help him a lot.”
Carlsen has been playing FPL for a few years now and like other Norwegians, takes a deep interest in Premier League. In 2017, eight players from Norway were in the top 50 FPL players in the world.
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